Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938-1944

Description

Forced labor was a key feature of Nazi anti-Jewish policy and shaped the daily life of almost every Jewish family in occupied Europe. This book systematically describes the implementation of forced labor for Jews in Germany, Austria, the Protectorate, and the various occupied Polish territories. As early as the end of 1938, compulsory labor for Jews had been introduced in Germany and annexed Austria by the labor administration. Similar programs subsequently were established by civil administrations in the German-occupied Czech and Polish territories. At its maximum extent, more than one million Jewish men and women toiled for private companies and public builders, many of them in hundreds of now often-forgotten special labor camps. This study refutes the widespread thesis that compulsory work was organized only by the SS, and that exploitation was only an intermediate tactic on the way to mass murder or, rather, that it was only a facet in the destruction of the Jews.

Wolf Gruner currently holds a position at the Institute for Contemporary History in Berlin, where he is coeditor and research on The Persecution and Extermination of the European Jews Under the Nazis, 1933-1945, a multivolume colleciton of primary sources. He is the author of many works on the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, and has held positions at Webster University, Harvard University, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others.

"This book fills an important gap in our knowledge and will be important for the study of the Holocaust and the workings of the Nazi economy." - History "Historians of Nazi perpetrators and their institutions have long been familiar with the work of Wolf Gruner. An East German who brings an outsider's perspective to the ingrown field of Holocaust studies, Gruner has written pathbreaking works... It is Gruner's great achievement to demonstrate how local, regional, and national initiatives constantly reinforced each other. Contemporary historians are wont to point to the various contradictory labour policies as evidence of a confused and inconclusive intent to murder the European Jews - even as evidence that a "comprehensive Final Solution" (Gesamtlosung) did not exist." - Journal of Genocide Research, Michael Thad Allen, Yale Law School "...a masterful work of scholarship." -Frederick M. Schweitzer, The Historian "Roughly one half of the book is a condensed reworking and update of Gruner's two earlier monographs on Jewish forced labor in Germany and Austria respectively, as well as of his fascinating article on the use of Polish Jews from od and Silesia in road construction projects in Germany." -Christopher R. Browning, Holocaust and Genocide Studies